night off

I had to work an extra day this last week because the number two driver (Sunday papers) wanted the day off because he announces for softball games and had five to do.  My initial urge was to say ****no, it’s your job, do it.

But then, the extra money lured me and I said Ok, I’ll do it.  It worked out well though, since I got to pay all my bills this week, when they were due, a seldom encountered event.  When I get started doing the bus driving job, it’ll like, double my income, and these check to check, hope nothing happens times will go away.

I did CDL training in 1989, just before Oregon adopted the CDL standards, which are Federal requirements, and it cost me over $3000 then.  My trucking jobs evaporated in the wake of the first gulf war, when Oregon’s economy went to shit and I went to Japan.  I didn’t renew the trucker’s license when it was up for renewal, because it was cheaper to just get a car driver’s license then.  I am getting paid $11.63 an hour now, training – paid, not paying.  The job will get me 95% paid health, vision, and dental care, the first full ride I’ve had in nearly 15 years…

Which, I guess is not strictly true. 

After the car wreck, when I moved out of the Foster Home, I was on the Oregon Health Plan, which gave me health, vision, and dental, but the OHP evaporated after just a few years, and I had hardly used it, because of a reluctance to "use" the system, even though I was, like, fully eligible to do so…

Ahhh, but that is the subject of a different entry, I guess.  Please excuse the tangent.

The point I initially wanted to make is that this time, the CDL training isn’t costing me anything but my time and effort, and that is being paid for and will be rewarded with the CDL and a good job.  I see the light at the end of this long tunnel I’ve been walking through since before the car wreck in 1998, and it is not an approaching train, fixing to obliterate me as it runs my ass over, it is indeed the future shining brightly and all I have to do is keep going and it will be mine to have and to hold and to live.

I felt guided to this job opportunity, despite that seeming to sound like something made up or just "felt".  I knew last year that I needed to find more work to support myself, that the paper job was just a stepping stone on the way to a better life.  I’d really like to keep that job, but I don’t know how long it will last – the paper’s readership has been and is in a long decline, and my "boss", the guy who owns the routes, may indeed be looking to sell them and move on to other things.  I don’t know if I go with the routes – or if I want to, but it has been a step to the future for me and I feel it has been a good thing for me.

For one thing, I got a van out of it.  Sure, it has cost me a lot, and I owe money to the bank for the cash I borrowed to keep it on the road, but where I had once nothing but dead vehicles (see the beginning entries of this diary) I now have a fully operable vehicle in my own name, that goes where I want and need it to and is mine.

My van helped guide me to this bus driving gig, and the CDL I will get from the training.  As I said, I long ago realised that I needed more to go further on my path, and yet, I only applied to one place for one job.  In one sense, I’ve put all my eggs in one basket, and placed my hopes there too.  It is meant to be that I do it this way.  I have faith that I am doing what I am meant to do.  I don’t know why, or who, or what, or anything but that I feel like I am doing the right thing, the "meant to be" thing.

In the not so distant past, I would be fully prepared to have it blow up in my face and to lose…but I don’t feel like it will, and I feel like I will gain a lot from staying on the path that I am on now.  I once had no job and all the time in the world and no money.  I am trading that time for money and for a degree of self-esteem that I have not had for many, many, many years.  That path has led me here, which has given me the opportunity to lose the basket I was hiding my light under, finally.

I have had the chance to shine here, on Open Diary, and have grabbed it to do so, and have, and do.  In turn, that shining has led me to reach for the future that can be mine.  I have reached out and touched people in ways I never thought I could, and in rewarding, significant ways too.

I may be babbling here, now, but I am writing as I think, and if I sat down and tried to form my thoughts, I might lose something through the processing that would diminish the meaning of the thoughts.  I know where I’ve been, and although I’m not really sure where I am going, I feel like I am on the right path, that I am going the right way, that life, fate, God, luck, whatever,  will reward me.

I am, more or less, but more than less, living the life I foresaw when I was a child.  And, that may well be the reward – living the life I wanted.  Maybe not the way I dreamed of, but a reasonable facicimile thereof.  How many can say that?  I feel so fortunate.

I am satisfied I am doing the right thing, and that more awaits me, but if this is "all", well, it is enough.

Enough.  It is all I can resonably ask for, is it not?  Enough.

*****